Thanks, Now I gotcha on the L and v2. I am not sure what the difference is. If it doesn't take the L V1 firmware then a look at what chipset and the other hardware would be in order.Have you looked into what they are using hardware wise on it?

One major difference between WNR3500L and WNR3500Lv2 is WNR3500L uses serial flash whereas WNR3500Lv2 uses NAND flash. So I assume some amount of modification need to be done in Tomato/DD-WRT/OpenWRT firmware to support this flash.

The reason why you cannot flash an existing chk file for the wnr3500l is, because the chk does not contain the correct header ( see ambitCfg in netgears src package) for the wnr3500lv2.

e.g.

WNR3500LV1:

#define AMBIT_HARDWARE_VERSION "U12H12700"

WNR3500LV2:#define AMBIT_HARDWARE_VERSION "U12H17200"

I can create a compatible chk file, that the netgear update interface will accept. I don't think the nand flash should be a problem, rather the partition/flash layout. I guess this unit also has 60K or 64K of nvram space.

@Tathagatathe current drivers included by dd-wrt do not contain a nflash.c as in the netgear package, the netgear shipped wl_ap.0 says it's of version Broadcom BCM%04x 802.11 Wireless Controller 5.60.136. So the drivers are brandnew and I also doubt the unit will work without updateing the drivers.

So we will have to wait for BS to update the driver, after that eko usually adds patterns mtd layouts etc.

This is great — releasing a router specifically marked as an open-source router, whereas not only is it not supported by OSS (due to lack of specifications and datasheets on the hardware), but noone in the open-source community is even notified regarding the hardware changes nor of the fact that the new and incompatible hardware is already shipping. With none of the 3rd party firmwares working out of the box for weeks after the ship date!

The only benefit of "keeping" it small is that you don't have to modify your kernel source code scripts etc.

So basically there was a time when 20k was okay, but since the feature set increased you need more, that howver requires a few changes in your code. This is why you have different builds now, e.g. my E3000 build is not the same as my wnr3500lv1 build although they have the same hardware, the E3000 has 60K nvram and I compile them once with 60k defined and without.

Therefore the only reason is can think of is that netgear sticks with such low nvram is because it is less work for them. The more models out there the more differences the more work has to be done.

Thus dd-wrt is currently the only router firmware that has a single codebase which can be used to create builds for any router platform and it is pretty easy to integrate a new model. Tomato is limited to a few platforms, openwrt does not support all platforms.